"The Legend of Order and Chaos: Communities and Early Community Ecology."
In Kevin deLaplante, et al., eds., Philosophy of Ecology. Elsevier BV, forthcoming 2009.

Review of Darwinism and Its Discontents, by Michael Ruse.  2009. Metaphilosophy 40(5): 702–710.

"Method and Metaphysics in Clements's and Gleason's Ecological Explanations"  2007.
  Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 38(1): 85–109.

"Chimeras and 'Human Dignity'" 2003.  with Josephine Johnston.
American Journal of Bioethics 3(3): W6–W8.
(a commentary on Jason Robert and Françoise Baylis, "Crossing Species Boundaries")

I work primarily on philosophy of science, especially with respect to biology and ecology. Philosophy of science analyzes how science works, why it works, and its difficulties. A difficulty for fields like ecology--the branch of biology dealing with the relationships among organisms and their environments--is that some things we want to understand have extremely many causes. Why oak trees rather than birch trees grow someplace, for instance, has no simple answer. I have been interested in how scientists offer explanations despite this complexity. My work on Frederic Clements and Henry Gleason analyzed how these two benchmark ecologists of the early twentieth-century tried to understand vegetation development. Currently, I am focused on explanations in recent ecology. Beyond philosophy of science, I am interested in philosophy of art and environmental aesthetics, environmental philosophy, philosophical issues to do with non-human animals, and the history of biology.

Updated 30 Aug 2009
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